


Pulling Teeth

by extortionist



Category: American Idiot - Green Day (Album), American Idiot - Green Day/Armstrong
Genre: Gen, jimmy is a dilf, like not in a meme way this is literally an older male jimmy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-15 21:54:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29321223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/extortionist/pseuds/extortionist
Summary: It was the afternoon and the light reflecting off of the buildings outside hurt his eyes but the promise of dessert had been worth getting out of bed and riding the subway to the parlor. Jimmy had woken him up an hour earlier and told him to get some clothes on because they were going out. Johnny wasn’t used to doing things in the daytime, especially with Jimmy, but he trusted whatever Jimmy had planned. He was right to, considering they were now sitting in a booth waiting for the ridiculous and ridiculously expensive sundae they’d ordered to arrive.
Relationships: Jesus of Suburbia & St. Jimmy, Johnny & St. Jimmy
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	Pulling Teeth

“You look good.”

Johnny cackled triumphantly and stared out the window of the ice cream parlor. It was the afternoon and the light reflecting off of the buildings outside hurt his eyes but the promise of dessert had been worth getting out of bed and riding the subway to the parlor. Jimmy had woken him up an hour earlier and told him to get some clothes on because they were going out. Johnny wasn’t used to doing things in the daytime, especially with Jimmy, but he trusted whatever Jimmy had planned. He was right to, considering they were now sitting in a booth waiting for the ridiculous and ridiculously expensive sundae they’d ordered to arrive. 

“Stole most of this shit from you,” Johnny said as he turned his attention back to the booth. Jimmy’s closet was full of things to admire, laugh at, and steal. He liked the terribly worn out old boots that he couldn’t wear because they were six sizes too big for him. The tight leather pants that Johnny couldn’t even look at without thinking he’d manage to rip them by eyeing them alone made him laugh. Jimmy mostly dressed in moderately worn black shirts and appropriately sized pants now but his closet was full of flamboyant pieces from the previous century. “You know what a Club Kid is, Jesus?”, Jimmy would say. It was funny that the beloved patriarchal dealer Johnny knew now used to dress like a makeup factory threw up on a punk Playgirl bunny. Luckily, Johnny managed to make a few pieces of clothing work despite their size difference. Clothes that had a history that wasn’t just a decade sitting in a suburban thrift store fascinated Johnny.

“It looks good on you,” Jimmy replied. Johnny felt Jimmy watch him as he watched the city folk pass by through the window. Johnny caught Jimmy looking at him more often than not; he thought that Jimmy had little faith in his ability to survive without him and always felt the need to keep an eye on him. It wouldn’t exactly be wrong. Without Jimmy, Johnny thought he’d have been swallowed whole by the city and would have never got his feet back on the ground again. He was used to being looked after: Tunny never left him alone in Jingletown. Ironically, Tunny had left him when he really needed the support. The city was big and hungry and ate boys like Johnny right up, disappeared 'em, according to Jimmy. He’d come into Johnny’s life at the exact right time. “Looks great with your tattoo.”

Johnny flashed him a grin and touched the healing tattoo on his neck softly with the pads of his fingers. Jimmy had taken him to a real tattoo parlor to get it done. His first tattoo was a patchy stick-and-poke smiley face that Will had haphazardly poked into his hip. Jimmy taking him to a real tattoo artist whom Jimmy actually knew was an entirely elevated experience. He recalled the buzz of the gun and the chatter between Jimmy and the artist and the death metal blaring from the CD player next to the chair in which Johnny had been seated. It was _cool._ Nothing like the do-it-yourself tattoos Will and Johnny had given each other nor the lame tattoo parlor in Jingletown Tunny went to to disappoint his mother. 

The ink on Johnny’s neck was a simple design–it was Jimmy’s symbol, the outline of a heart with an upside-down cross running down the middle. Jimmy had tried to tell Johnny the cross was Satanic. Johnny informed him that it was St. Peter’s cross, actually, and St. Peter was the leader of Jesus’s apostles–ain’t that funny–just the same way St. Jimmy was Johnny’s favorite disciple. Johnny liked the tattoo. He thought it made him look tough. “Pretty cool, huh?”

“Really cool,” Jimmy said. 

A waitress stopped next to their booth and set a massive sundae in a bowl larger than Johnny’s head down on their table. 

“Holy fuck,” Johnny said.

“Thanks,” Jimmy said as the waitress handed them spoons and left. 

“This is the biggest thing I’ve seen in my entire life,” Johnny said.

“You’ve seen bigger,” Jimmy said. 

“Are we gonna be able to eat this whole thing?” Johnny asked. 

“Seriously?” Jimmy pointed his spoon at Johnny. “I _know_ you're up for this.”

“It’s like, ten scoops,” Johnny said as he popped a spoonful into his mouth and kept talking around it. “Big ones. And whipped cream, and sauce, and whatever all that extra shit is.”

“Nuts?” Jimmy said. “Do you not know what a nut is?”

“I never had nothin’ this wild in my life,” Johnny said. “This is New York-sized shit. Where I’m from they don’t feed people like this. You want this, you gotta say you want ten fuckin’ scoops in a bowl and whipped cream and sauce and nuts and shit. You order a sundae and you get a scoop with exactly one spoon of sprinkles on it. We got the cheap-ass little parlor with the couple of flavors and waffle cones if you’re lucky. And all they had was sprinkles. And all the sprinkles was the same color. And they had like, a couple of bar stools and a couple of tables.”

Jingletown was boring. It was the center of the Earth, hot like Hell and so devoid of life its denizens were walking corpses. The ice cream parlor fit right in. Johnny thought of the peeling pink wallpaper inside the ice cream parlor. It was yellowed with age at the corners. He and Will would stand inconspicuously against the wall near the counters while they waited for their orders and pick at the shreds. There were jars of sprinkles on the countertops and vats of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry ice cream in the freezer. The tables were off-white and textured with two seats at each. The city was the center of the universe. It had appropriately universe-sized offerings. Jimmy watched Johnny as he absentmindedly spooned sundae into his mouth.

“Is it good?” Jimmy asked.

Johnny nodded and sucked on his spoon. 

Jimmy reached across the table and tucked a stray chunk of Johnny’s hair behind his ear. 

“My dad used to take me to get ice cream,” Johnny said, staring at the table.

“Did he?” Jimmy said. 

“I’d play with Will at the park and then he’d take me to get ice cream. And it’s fall so the leaves are comin’ down. All orange and shit. And then you jump on them to make them crunch. The good ones crunch. The ones that don’t suck. And he’d hold my hand ‘cause I was a kid and I would run into the street if he didn’t. I was like that, as a kid. I guess as a grown-up too. I ain’t gonna wait for cars to stop. If I’m goin’ somewhere I either go or I get hit. I don’t care either way. And we’d get ice cream ‘cause it was still warm even though it’s fall. And I sit at one of the tables and wait for him to hand me my cone. And he tells me not to tell Mom ‘cause she was uptight and she didn’t like me gettin’ snuck all those treats. But it was special, ‘cause it was just me and him. I lost my tooth once gettin’ ice cream. One of my front ones. Then I had a lisp. Then I never grew out of it ‘cause my teeth grew in wonky. But it was just me and my dad and the ice cream place in Jingletown.”

“You’ve got ice cream on your hands,” Jimmy said, moving closer to Johnny and guiding his spoon back into the bowl from where Johnny had been awkwardly hovering it in front of him. He wiped at Johnny’s hands with a napkin as Johnny looked blankly down at himself. “Look, you talked so long it melted all over you. Come back here, kiddo. You ain’t in Jingletown anymore.”

“Yeah,” Johnny said. He halfheartedly rubbed his hand on the napkin before giving up and letting Jimmy clean him. 

“Hey,” Jimmy said, setting the napkin back on the table and firmly taking Johnny by the back of his neck with his palm. “You here? C’mon, Jesus. The city look like Jingletown to you?”

“Yeah,” Johnny said again, looking up at Jimmy as he grazed his fingers along the tattoo on his neck. “Yeah, whatever. I’m here.”

“Good boy,” Jimmy said with a smile as Johnny’s voice got stronger. Johnny huffed out a sigh and blinked, looking back at the partially eaten dish of ice cream on the table. Jimmy always managed to ground him when his mind decided to wander back into the unforgiving wasteland of childhood memories. They were often few and far between but whenever Johnny slipped back into them he was able to stay in them for ages, recalling every sight and sound and feeling. When he was high it was worse; he was able to get trapped in the liminal space of remembering when he fell in between dimensions as the drugs hijacked his brain. Jimmy was always there to hold him in the right way and say the right things to him to reel him out of his childhood and back into his city. Whether he was lost in thoughts of being little with his dad and mom or his turbulent adolescence with Will and Tunny, he knew it was useless to think back. He was no longer the same person he was when he was in Jingletown; Jesus was more confident, slicker, better. Jimmy was there to build him up and save him from the pitfalls of memory. Without Jimmy, Johnny would be lost.

Johnny smiled faintly and dug his spoon back into the ice cream to get another bite. Beside him, Jimmy draped an arm across his shoulders and held him steady.


End file.
